[ Reminder ] The PBE is a testing ground for changes. What you see here may not reflect what you see in Patch Notes. Remember that developers want your feedback so if you disagree with a change, you can always submit your thoughts on the PBE Community Forums.

Three new Summoner Icons have been added. No news yet on how to get these (URF ICON HYPE):

Cosmic Binding [ Q ]

Cooldown decreasedÂ from 10 seconds at all ranks to 11/10/9/8/7

RiftwalkÂ [ R ]

Range decreasedÂ from 550 to 500 [ this is a decrease from the PBE value. On live the range is 450 ]

Cooldown decreasedÂ from 7/5/3 seconds to 6/4/2

Initial mana cost decreased from 60 at all ranksÂ to 50

Titan’s Wrath [ W ]

Shield scalilngÂ increasedÂ from 7/9.5/12/14.5/17% of maximum health to 9/11/13/15/17%

On-hit damageÂ while shieldedÂ increased from 15/30/45/60/75 to 30/40/50/60/70 [ an increase compared to the value in this PBE update. Live value is still 40/55/70/85/100 ]

RiptideÂ [ E ]

Cooldown increased from 6/5.5/5/4.5/4 seconds to 7/6.5/6/5.5/5 [ live value is 10 seconds at all ranks ]

Flame Breath [ E ]Â

On-hit magic damage increased from 2% of maximum healthÂ to 2.5%

Decimating Smash [ Q ]

Mana cost decreasedÂ from 40/45/50/55/60 to 45 at all ranks [ live value isÂ 45/50/55/60/65 ]

Soul FurnaceÂ [ W ]

Mana cost increasedÂ from 60/65/70/75/80Â to 65/70/75/80/85 [ reverted to live value ]

Event Horizon [ E ]

Delay now starts at the moment the spell is cast, not after Veigar finishes his cast animation

Luden’s Echo, the new 120 AP Item, has received its in-game icon.

Luden’s Echo

Cost: 3100 Gold

Builds out of a Needlessly Large Rod (1600 Gold) and Aether Wisp (850 Gold)

Grants 120 AP and 7% Movement Speed

UNIQUE Passive: Gain charges upon moving or casting. At 100 charges, the next spell hit expends all charges to deal 100 (+0.15 AP) bonus magic damage to up to 4 targets hit.

Luden’s Echo has a tooltip icon similar to the one of Statikk Shiv. At 100 charges, purple bolts come out of the spell’s first (or only) target and seek nearby enemies to hit.

The recently-announcedÂ Mandrake Ward is now available for testing. Note, it may not be available for Patch 5.5.

Mandrake Ward

Costs 35 Gold

Click to Consume: Summons a sentry to run and burrow in target brush (within 1200 range) for 2 minutes. While burrowed, it becomes blind and invisible but will ping the map if a visible or invisible enemy is within 1000 range.

(Counts as a Stealth Ward)(May only carry 3 Stealth Wards at a time.)

The Mandrake Ward needs to target a brush. When cast, a small sapling walks towards the brush and plants itself, pinging once when an enemy walks into that brush, be it visible or invisible, and then disappears. If you don’t target a brush, you’ll receive an error message.

Bard’s lore for antsÂ is now available:

“Bard travels through realms beyond the imagination of mortal beings. Some of Valoran’s greatest scholars have spent their lives trying to understand the mysteries he embodies. This enigmatic spirit has been given many names throughout the history of Valoran, but titles such as Cosmic Vagabond and Great Caretaker only capture a fleeting aspect of his true purpose. When the unknowable structure of the universe is threatened, Bard steers all existence away from utter annihilation.”

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me atÂ @NoL_ChefoÂ or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

Note: The following item is highly experimental and probably won’t ship any time soon, if at all. All assets are temporary and are absolutely not final.

Hey guys.

I’m putting up some experimental content for exploration.

Mandrake Ward
50G

Click to Consume: Places an invisible blind sentry in a brush for 5 minutes. The plant will ping the map if a visible or invisible enemy enemy is within 900 range.

(Counts as a Stealth Ward)
(May only carry 3 Stealth Wards at a time.)

This is intended to be an early game ward to protect the lane against the jungle without revealing a jungler’s prospective health or directional pathing. It’s also an answer to early game stealth for lane protections now that pinks are fairly woefully inequipped at dealing with the task. There’s some neat tricks (it can sense over walls) that it has currently – but it still needs a ton of iteration to feel usable personally.

Will be doing some polish work over the next couple days trying to get it in a cleaner state – last I checked, I missed a file somewhere and it’s probably super bugged on PBE – also need to think about ping throttling the thing in terms of sounds and motion. Eventually it’ll require a custom ping sound and error handling – but for now, everything is highly temp and experimental.

I’m curious to see whether or not people feel like the item’s purpose is clear.

The item hopefully doesn’t feel like it’s worth a slot end-game and make end-game consumable purchase cycles even worse.

Currently it pings at where the breach occurs – but given that it’s a mini-map ping, you’re not really going to catch any difference – though you’re right that it should probably ping itself rather than the point location.

The initial reasoning that it provides you much less information than a sight ward does.

For example, you don’t get the items of the champion you detected (because you never saw him).
You don’t know the champion’s health status or direction (because the ping is centered on the mandrake).
You’re not sure if he’s passing through or if he’s actually aggressing on the lane.
You’re not even really sure which champion it was – but you can probably do that by process of elimination.

It might be a total mistake to have it at 5 minutes as it feels like an eternity – but that’s another one of the things that I’d want to feel out in testing.

In a world where Eve is a primary jungler and there are no way of mitigating the effects of her game other than complete passivity – Evelynn will probably never be good.

So you get to a point where either

Eve can’t be a junglerÂ -OR-

There needs to be a way to mitigate the effects of her stealth somehow in order for her to be good.

When you introduce the item to mitigate the effect of long term stealth – for the short term, absolutely it will make her power level holistically lower. However – this is the only possibility space in which Eve could be powerful in the future.

so, the title pretty much covered this but we’ve got a new ap item hitting the pbe soon! as we mentioned in the 5.2 patch notes, we’ve been spending some time exploring a few different options to add another “late-game mage item” into the game. we’re now at the point where we want to share one of those directions with our pbe testers and see how the item is received with a wider audience. one of the goals of these explorations was to discover something that is especially exciting to a particular mage play style, and as you’ll quickly notice, this item takes the basic actions of moving around the battlefield and repeatedly slinging spells and rewards them by casting its own spell into the fray! we have some initial thoughts on which play styles are in want of something like this, but more importantly we’re interested in seeing what the community does with the new item.

alright, let’s talk about our current timeline! this item should be on the pbe soon (tomorrow if everything checks out okay) but will not be shipping in the 5.4 patchâ€”we’ve still got a bit of testing and number crunching to do on top of getting non-placeholder art and sound. if you’re wondering exactly when this would be shipping, the honest answer is that right now we’re focused more on getting the item into the hands of testers and confirming that we’re happy with this direction than we are about shipping anything by a certain date. the classic “when it’s ready” shipping date, if you will.

with all that out of the way, here are the item stats of the first pbe iteration!

Item 3285 (3100g)

Needlessly Large Rod + Aether Wisp + 650g

+120 Ability Power

+7% Movement Speed

UNIQUE Passive: Gain charges upon moving or casting. At 100 charges, the next spell hit expends all charges to deal 100 (+15% AP) bonus magic damage to up to 4 targets on hit.

Please note that this is a work in progress and that its name, as well as any art or sound assets, is to be considered placeholder.

that should do it for the item’s introduction (i’ll update this post if i forgot something). looking forward to the discussion about the item!

This brave little poro is fighting back against the onslaught of aerial assault alongside the other Dragonslayers. With his vigilance, youâ€™ll never be surprised again whether itâ€™s an impromptu dance of dragons or a sneaky attempted gank.

Rise up against the dragon horde with the Dragonslayer Poro Ward Skin available now untilÂ 23:59 PST on February 27Â forÂ 640 RP.

Currently she’s not. We had a few update concepts back in the day but she just doesn’t have any sort of story direction or explanation of what the hell she is. Until we hammer that out we probably won’t be doing anything with her until then.

I think there’s some good ideas in the Shadow Isles ideas, and heck, I could see her playing into the Darkin thing if we ever build that out. There’s a lot of options, so that’s good. She’s wide open in terms of actually making a character out of.

The patch that reduced the width of Syndra’s Q+E stun also significantly reduced the radius of the initial check around a sphere that’s been hit to see if there’s a unit there that should be stunned before the sphere starts moving. We’ve got a change on the PBE at present that increases both that radius and the Q+E width as it travels. Assuming that change goes live I believe that will probably help out with the problem you’re seeing – as far as I’m aware Q timing hasn’t been changed at all.

Hotfixes (making quick changes to the servers without taking them down for a longer maintenance period) have extra risk associated with them. Hotfix changes do get tested extensively, but it’s over a shorter period of time so it’s not completely equal to a full patch cycle of testing. As a result in order to justify the risk involved hotfixes need to be really high value (e.g. X champion is currently disabled because they crash the game) or be at least fairly high value and really low risk (e.g. changing a single number in a text file that corrects a major damage bug). In this particular case Xin Zhao’s Q doesn’t knock up if the target isn’t moving at the time of the third hit. That’s definitely a significant bug, but it’s not crippling him and the fix involves code changes, which are much riskier than just changing data values. As a result (as far as I’m aware, server patches aren’t my area of expertise) we’re not currently planning to hotfix this bug.

In terms of how often we update we’re currently putting out a patch every two weeks generally (major exceptions around things like Worlds, Christmas etc). I can understand your frustration that fixes like this can take a bit of time to come out, that’s the same cadence of patches as in Season 1 back in 2011 though.